how to start preparing for A2

any tips on how to stay organised this year and should i be going over AS work right now?

Just finished A2- I went over the first unit in every subject in the summer break although it didn't do wonders in my science subjects- only works if you have set reading I guess. But the best thing I did was research as many different learning/studying/ revising/organising techniques as possible and created a system I was going to use in A2 that would work for me. At AS I worked hard but I didn't work well which is why I ended up stressed with mediocre grades. At A2, I was prepared for my exams as I worked solidly throughout the year doing my own thing and hopefully it will be reflected in my grades.I wrote a blog post about it (link below) but note you have to find what works for you and stick to it. Advice is great but you know yourself and your limits so mentally prepare yourself for stepping up in A2. https://simplythandi.wordpress.com/2016/06/23/ace-your-a-levels/

Reply 2

GabbytheGreek_48

amazing blog and great advice thank you very much just wondering how did you do on your AS results?

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Reply 3

negin1347

What subjects do you study?

Reply 4

goal101

Original post by negin1347

What subjects do you study?

Biology psychology sociology and English lit ( eng I'm probably dropping)

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Reply 5

negin1347

Unfortunately I don't study any of those subjects to give you advice on what to prepare in the summer. I recommend posting threads on those A-level subject pages and hope that someone will give you advice to what you can do. Maybe look over at the syllabus of your A2 courses and do some pre-reading, or make some notes on the first 2/3 chapters of each of your subjects, that's what i do for maths, i always study few chapters during the summer so i have an advantage when i go back to school. Then during school i pre-learn the next few chapters, so i'm always ahead of the class and so i'm never stressed when we have any chapter tests/mocks as i barely need to revise since i've done a lot of work beforehand.

My friend does biology and i remember that she had a really big problem for her coursework, basically i think you need to create a question and do experiments, but she wasn't sure on the topic and she spent soooooo long trying to just come up with something, and she rushed it and ended up getting a grade lower than what she had hoped for, so maybe that's a start, look into topics you can do for your coursework.

Reply 6

GabbytheGreek_48

biology doesn't have coursework anymore as its on the new spec

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Reply 7

secretagent98

I do English language, Spanish, psychology and maths (hopefully be dropping maths) and think I'm gonna get a head start too because I found AS so stressful so if you have any tips please share!! :smile:

Reply 8

negin1347

If you weren't dropping maths I would be able to give you more tips. But, i took french, do you do AQA Spanish, if you do what are you cultural topics that you're going to study next year?

Reply 9

GabbytheGreek_48

I do maths! did AS spanish but definitely dropping it next year

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Reply 10

negin1347

For maths I recommend doing the two chapters of trigonometry and differentiation in c3. And after do vectors and integration of c4, (if you do end up doing integration you may also need to know how to do partial fractions which is chapter 1 of c4). You probably will not have time to do both c3 and 4 so I just recommend doing c3 now and then doing c4 in the winter break.
Use Hegarty videos to make notes and learn the content: https://mathswebsite.com
Definitely do trigonometry atleast if you can't do the others and use this website to do all the questions by topic: http://www.physicsandmathstutor.com/a-level-maths-papers/#C3
And if you don't have your text book, then on the 'solution bank' of that website they'll have the questions of the text book and the answers with working out as well. Make sure you do some of the questions from the book before doing exam questions, do the mixed exercises at the very least.
Examination questions are very important! Use examsolutions YouTube videos for going through exam questions you get wrong.
http://examsolutions.net
Take a screenshot of the questions you make mistakes and redo them at some point, and also make a list of 'tips and tricks' that you come accross, there will definitely be tricks in trig that you should take a note of.

Reply 11

secretagent98

Original post by negin1347

If you weren't dropping maths I would be able to give you more tips. But, i took french, do you do AQA Spanish, if you do what are you cultural topics that you're going to study next year?

I don't even think i'll get an E in maths, struggled so much throughout the year and when I finally began to understand it weeks before the exam I lacked so much confidence due to previous mock results and messed up! Yes I'm doing AQA Spanish, we're doing Laura Esquivel Como agua para chocolate and Guillermero del torro films (I think they're the culture topics anyway)

Reply 12

negin1347

OK for Spanish, research your cultural topics, but first make a list of all the essay questions that have come up and try and predict what will come up for your exam usually there's a pattern and the older ones repeat (that's what I did and I predicted correctly for AS and A2 exams. i studied film as well, so there are 4 main types of questions:
1)analyse themes of the film
2) analyse techniques of the movie (like camera angle, or if there are any hidden and subtle messages that you recognize which u think director did on purpose)
3) influences that the director had, so basically what were the reasons which made him want to direct
4) this last type of question is a very open question and sometimes they give you a quote and ask to what extent do you agree with what they said. An example (This was the question that I got for my french paper this year) "great artists/directors take inspiration from the real world and they turn it into something extraordinary" To what extent is this true?
Ok so in these types of questions you can use a combination of the first three types of questions, so I wrote about how he was influenced to write from the inspiration of real world (the movie I studied discussed a lot of social problems in France and so I said during the time the film was shot there was lots of racism/violence/poverty etc which pushed the director to expose these problems). The second part of the quote which says they make the film into something extraordinary I analyses the incredible techniques and the themes he presented in the movie which caught everyone's attention.

Research about the topic but make sure it's relevant to these questions, and for the film it's such a great topic because in Spanish write on the Internet 'the name of your film...reviews' and basically you will get a lot of people who use great language talking about the film, it's themes and techniques, and you can copy some of the phrases.

What's your other cultural topic?

And do you have your text book with you the A2 aqa book? Or on kerboodle the online version? If you do I can tell you other things to prepare for the speaking, which even if you did a bit would help.

And how good is your grammar? If not so good I can send you some links to help with it.

I'm just wondering, next year I was planning on maybe going around to schools in the UK giving lots of tips to french students, and I would charge around £ 2.50 per student, and this tip I gave u for the cultural topic is literally one little bit of how much I would offer. Do you think students would be interested? Like would you go yourself for something like this? And I would speak for around 1hr about reading, listening, writting and speaking.

Reply 13

secretagent98

Original post by negin1347

Thank you so much!!! We've only been told about the book and the film so I'm not sure what other topics we'll be covering. We're getting the a2 Spanish books when we go back in September but I've been looking for ways to get a head start so I don't feel like I'm constantly struggling to catch up and with this advice I certainly can!! Grammar is okay, depends on how hard it is, if it's a really hard grammar section then i'd usually get about 7/10 but for the easier ones its usually 9 or 10.

I think going round to schools would certainly be beneficial, as a language student I know how daunting it can be, especially the jump from GCSE to Alevel so your advice could be a great help to lots of language students out there!

Reply 14

negin1347

Original post by secretagent98

I'm glad you find my advice useful. I also wanted to say that when i asked what's your other cultural topic i meant is it a book/historical topic/geographical topic, because for the other one you specifically said it's a 'film', you only do get 2 cultural topics. I did a historical topic, but for the book the technique is quite similar to the film, I assume it's basically what you did for english literature at gcse but in french. Do the same thing i suggested for the film, see how many types of questions there are, make a list and predict what will come up (but never only rely on the predictions, revise everything but maybe stress on the things you think will come up a bit more).

If you want to work on grammar, or even learning vocab 'memrise' is a great site. The link below is a course created by a different account and you can use it for grammar, if you search on the course
http://www.memrise.com/course/122116/learn-spanish-conjugation/
For AQA A2 vocab for spanish i found this link. You might find better ones, search on google A2 aqa spanish vocab memrise. But I read the english vocab and it seemed similar to the vocabs i had to learn. http://www.memrise.com/course/779550/spanish-a2-aqa-4/

Also, if you don't have much time learning vocab, not necessarily now in the summer, but just in general even closer to exams, always learn the verbs first, because if you know the verbs you can always have an idea of what the noun is, i'll give you an example in english. Lets say you didn't know what the verb 'to eat' was but you knew what the noun 'pizza' meant, if there was a sentence 'i eat pizza' then you might guess that the sentence would be 'i like pizza' or 'i cook pizza' or 'i buy pizza', etc and therefore it generally changes the sentences meaning COMPLETELY. But, if it was the other way around and you knew what 'to eat' was and didn't know what pizza was, then you would know that the sentence is about someone eating something, 'i eat+noun' although you don't know the noun, it still doesn't change the meaning of the whole sentence, you may not guess what the noun is but sometimes from the whole context/paragraph you would, like if the whole paragraph was talking about junk food then you may assume it's burger/pizza. This is really useful for when you have to translate a paragraph from spanish to english.

If you want to prepare for speaking, then go on kerboodle (i'm assuming you have an account), look at the topics from the digital book and make a 'for and against' for the topics, it would be even better if you went on the aqa site for spanish a-level and go on unit 4, here you'll see all the spanish cards. There are two opinions on the card, opinion 1 and 2, you have to pick an opinion and speak for a minute presenting your arguments, lets say you chose opinion 1 about Against nuclear energy. So you say things like it's bad for the environment, it's dangerous, it can be used in war, etc. in your first minute always try and look from the environmental, social, political, economical, militarily, demographical etc perspective. Then you need to think about the arguments your opponent (examiner) will have and you need to counter argue their point which you will debate them on for around 4 minutes, so if they say oh but so many jobs will be lost if we shut down the nuclear stations, but then you can counter argue by saying no the government can shut them down slowly one by one and at the same time encourage businesses to open in Renewable energy sectors, so jobs will be created in that sector, so jobs aren't really 'lost', they can technically argue back saying 'people in the nuclear sector are specialized in that sector and so won't be able to change jobs easily' ok so an examiner is highly unlikely to say something back after they have counter argued back once, they usually just counter argue once and then move on trying to counter argue another point. So it's a good idea to make a table of for and against the topics of the card, so you have your arguments and you can be prepared what your opponent will say.